I know everyone hates Adobe (I certainly share some of the grievances about their pricing structure) but I have been using Photoshop for something like 23 years, working across half that many creative disciplines, and cannot overstate how much I value the consistency, reliability, and neutron-star density of its feature set. You call it bloated, I call it a Swiss army knife. I don't want every tool to be that way, but I love that some are. (The problem with this analogy is that Photoshop actually /is/ the best tool for many of the things it can do, where the Swiss army knife is solidly in jack-of-all-trades territory.)
Given this, I am very concerned about Adobe's continued march into web apps. For most of my UI and web design work, I use Figma, and quite like its feature set, but that I cannot use it offline and that I cannot work in a file that requires over 2GB of RAM due to its browser RAM cap is infuriating to me when Photoshop (the supposedly worse program) enables me to manually allocate as much of my system's 64GB of RAM as I please. It's difficult to imagine any web app stably and efficiently growing to Swiss army knife-levels of capability. Not just in terms of performance and resource management, but also GUI, keyboard shortcuts, etc.
I've long assumed my CC subscription would die with me, unlike many (most?) of my peers, but if the web-based Photoshop somehow became the primary Photoshop, I may have to cancel my subscription, and then kill myself.
Big disclaimer that I work for Figma, so HEAVY biases here.
In my eyes the 2GB/4GB limit for browser memory caps feels like an implementation issue rather than it being the wrong platform. At least for me, I value the ability to easily collaborate with people more than the need to have code be explicitly local or for things to be offline. The browser is excellent at that, and the explosion of online SASS products over locally installed apps in the last decade has shown it to be true for most use cases.
I don't think it's difficult at all to imagine a web app "stably and efficiently growing to Swiss army knife-levels of capability". Increasing that per-tab memory limit feels like an easier hill to climb than finding a way to provide that instant access for everyone and collaboration baked into locally installed apps.
Also don't kill yourself, even if it's a joke, life is more than software.
Appreciate your thoughts! The suicide bit was definitely a joke, so no worries there.
I hear what you're saying, and definitely get how the sharing bit that has helped Figma take off like it has is good for the browser. I'm a bit at odds with the industry, though, in that that's probably one of the things I like least about Figma. But a lot of that is because I'm not always the best team player :].
I won't pretend to know enough about what goes into building these programs to say whether the RAM cap or native app collaboration is the more difficult thing to overcome, but it's clear to me that I would prioritize these differently from others.
For all shit we give Adobe we have to give them credit. Over time their tools become incredibly good for productivity (even though they might suck hard in certain departments like performance). I've been around for long enough to see few of these. Freehand for example - there were tears and cries for help when they got ahold of it. Illustrator was shit at the time; Today it's awesome and an industry standard. Flash, same story. After Effects, same story. Premiere, same story. Indesign, same story. Etc.. Hard reason why most of those became industry standard was/is that Adobe understands how to cater to the user of those. Performance sucks, yes. Stability? Sometimes as well. User experience? The best. It's like with Microsoft and dev tools.
I think that cuts both ways in that while they do incrementally improve the products, they never would be industry standard if not for Adobe pushing them. Also worth noting that a lot of their portfolio was acquired once it had been threatening their turf and becoming established (Macromedia early on, Figma most recently). Their Suite approach lets them float tools for awhile before determining if they're worthwhile to continue developing or if they need to be axed, or merged into existing products.
Small fix: over time some of their tools become incredibly good for productivity.
Because they have an excellent track record of completely ignoring the glaring problems with some of their apps like become slower even though cpus and gpus are getting faster (looking at you, Lightroom team)
> Performance sucks, yes. Stability? Sometimes as well. User experience? The best
Not sure how this makes sense. If the performance is not good, and the stability is lacking, then the user experience cannot be the best. I rather use a video editor that makes me go through two menus instead of one, rather than having a video editor that crashes on me or takes ages to generate the proxy clips (or even need proxy clips for 4K and below footage).
If Adobe pulls all the stops and produces value corresponding to what it charges, which is crazy--then, I might reconsider my views, maybe their business incentives have aligned very well now and they can become a virtuous monopoly.
You wouldn't know it from the comments on this site, though, my GOD, all negative yours is the first positive.
Further, Figma did a good thing for the end user by selling out to Adobe--at a very steep price. Their holding out for a huge price is virtuous, yes of course more money for them, but if you're selling out, charging a lot is virtuous, taking as big a bite as you can out of the giant.
I’ve been using Photoshop alternatives for a long time now, but when I was a kid, I had access to Photoshop (version 2.5 and later 5.0). I’m used to the alternatives. Mostly Gimp, Krita, Pixelmator, and Procreate.
Recently I had a chance to use Photoshop 7 on an old iMac G4 that I acquired. Surely this would be like living in the dark ages, banging some rocks together?
Well, no. It turns out that this old version of Photoshop is easy to use and powerful. I can quickly do simple graphic design tasks that would take me longer in other programs or leave me frustrated. I can also do a bunch of simple photo editing tasks that I’ve been missing out on. This experience really highlighted how I’ve gotten used to missing features or poorly-designed UIs in programs like Gimp. Simple things like messing with channels, changing the brush size, working with 16-bit color and alternative color spaces, layer styles, nice text layers—it’s all just there and working and ready to use, in this nearly 20-year-old software.
CS5 Master Suite w/discs and valid serial from a reputable seller on eBay still commands $200-300+ which is nuts to me. But, when I realize that I can do all of my modern graphics workflow in this 12 year old software I get it.
I would love to use some of the newer parts of the suite but the functionality of my CS5 still 100% covers my use-case. For photography I've ended up on Darktable, and if I need to manually retouch a photo there's nothing stopping me from a Darktable <> Photoshop CS5 workflow.
As much as I want to love Gimp - I can't. It is outright ineffective and lacks features compared to even my 12 year old Photoshop. The people who continue to tout it as a 1:1 replacement have never worked in a professional graphics workflow.
Also, Procreate is amazing for doing illustrations though - I really wish I had it when I was learning digital painting!
---
Regardless, just wandering sharing anecdotes because I relate to your experiences. Hard agree that legacy versions of Photoshop (and honestly the entire suite) are still insanely powerful. I also find them to be way more stable than their newer counterparts. They're just objectively a better financial decision - I bought this a decade ago and I don't have a monthly $50-60 Adobe draw on my bank account.
I still use Photoshop 3 on a Mac Quadra and CS2 on an old Intel Mac with the help of Rosetta. For anything requiring more modern workflow there is the Affinity Suite.
I still have a CS5 (or 5.5/6) master suite license somewhere from i was able to purchase it under ‘educational’ discount back in the day, but I figured it won’t work on newer machines and OS.
Windows 10 - absolutely zero issues for me. Rock-solid stability.
Here's my install notes - just make sure you don't launch Photoshop/Illustrator prematurely:
* Skip the "setup an adobe ID" step
* Only install "Adobe Photoshop" and "Adobe Illustrator"
* On right-hand side deselect not needed components
* Story Extension
* Browser Lab
* Air
* Media Player
* Device Service
* Site Catalyst
* Keep useful components
* Fonts
* Extension Manager
* ExtendScript
* Check both "Services" and "Task Scheduler" to make 100% the update manager did not get installed
* Disable Adobe SwitchBoard service
* Delete the OOBE directory from C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Adobe
* Delete the AAMUpdaterInventory directory from C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Adobe
* Launch Photoshop, Photoshop x64, and Illustrator for first time and skip past any registration screens
* Reboot system and repeat previous two steps to ensure no updaters/etc. are installed and software works without warning on first load
* NOTE: On reboot/second check it looks like a service gets scheduled so repeating these steps is important! (hooks on reboot by Adobe installer)
* Type "Startup Apps" and ensure all Adobe apps not starting with system
Apparently Wine no longer works well on an up to date version of macOS. Is this true? Sad if so, because I didn't even know Wine worked on any OS-X, period, and I never got to enjoy it!
> Note that Wine does not work well with macOS 10.15 Catalina. Apple removed 32-bit support in Catalina, which is a critical part of the macOS system that almost all of Wine relies on. You can run 64-bit applications through Wine on Catalina, but very few applications for Windows are 64-bit. If you need to use Wine, you should not upgrade to Catalina.
I should probably have stated that I used it in an older version of Mac OS before Catalina, I forgot that they dropped 32-bit support. Apparently if you're savvy enough there are ways to get around it, but I don't know if this would still work with newer versions of Mac OS [1]
Virtually all the free alternatives to Photoshop are similar to 1995-2000 era Photoshop. In that era, gimp and Photoshop were neck-and-neck, with gimp missing color models and deep color.
Photoshop from that era was pretty simple and easy-to-write. It worked well, and so did the alternatives. Adobe invested an incredible amount into research to build a more serious moat around 2022-era Photoshop.
I work with the creative cloud/suite daily, and judging from what I read on twitter and in various forums, I get the feeling that I must be among the only happy Adobe customers out there.
I appreciate the continual new features and updates (exception: losing the Pantone solid book), but I feel the overall value proposition is better than it’s ever been. I remember spending hundreds annually on design suite upgrades. Now, a regular subscription gets me all of their software, a generous font selection, photoshop brushes, much more.
Taking Adobe for granted and kicking them around online has become a sport for some, but I suspect it’s a very loud but small segment of their customers.
Yeah, I hear you. A CC subscription is not cheap, but it's pretty incredible what you get for ~$600/yr, especially compared to what's offered by other subscriptions people pay for without blinking an eye.
I'm as eager—if not more—to take on massive greedy corporations as the next person, but my guillotine would be dull well before I got to Adobe's neck.
The problem is the bloat. I have CC access via work, but still choose to go with Affinity because of the performance issues. I counted 20 processes running the last time I had PS installed. The apps all take forever to load, drain battery if working remotely, and are far more unstable than in the past. I too grew up in PS in the 90s, but let's not pretend it's not become a dumpster fire - albeit a very feature rich dumpster fire as you stated.
I agree that Figma shares many of these same issues performance wise. Truthfully the only creative software I use that I truly enjoy these days is Blender. Hopefully one day the passion of Blender will make it to other areas in the creative software space.
Adobe keep adding pointless new features which I have to keep turning off in the preferences.
The new save dialog is insane. No, I don't want to save a copy just because I want to save a jpeg. Why is this even a question?
I have no idea why it isn't possible to copy/paste text with its blending options. Select All, Copy - Nope. All you get is the text, with none of the effects. (I know you can duplicate a layer - but not to a different document.)
Why does Creative Cloud install three versions? I suppose it's nice that I have v21, v22 and v23 but - why?
There still isn't a simple "paste clipboard to new document" command - something Paintshop Pro had back in the 90s.
Does anyone at Adobe actually use PS professionally? These are all simple usability issues that could be fixed with a bit of thought. But instead we get Neural Filters - useless - and the occasional core behaviour that changes for no good reason.
> The new save dialog is insane. No, I don't want to save a copy just because I want to save a jpeg. Why is this even a question?
I don't like the new save/load stuff either, and much prefer the old versions you can toggle, but that does bring up the fact that /you can toggle stuff/ and really customize the app to your preferences. I don't know any other visual creative tools with the depth of customization that Photoshop affords, between the fully modular GUI, actions, etc. A side note: jpgs saving as a copy has always been the default when you're working with a psd. There used to be a way to turn off the 'copy' appendage (like you can when duplicating layers), but I can't remember if it's still there.
> I know you can duplicate a layer - but not to a different document.
You can, actually! Been able to for a very long time. Right-click on the layer > Duplicate layer > Destination > Document. Pick another document you have open or create a new one with that layer. Pretty handy!
> I know you can duplicate a layer - but not to a different document.
Sure you can, at least as far back as CS6. In the Duplicate Layer dialog, there's a Destination group that includes a Document dropdown. You can select any open file or create a new one to serve as the target.
Yeah, I hate the cloud saving too. Fortunately that's something you can customize: Preferences > File Handling > Default File Location.
There are a lot of other useful settings in that panel for people (like me) who don't like a lot of the changes that have come down with Creative Cloud file handling.
I haven't used any of the Affinity apps. But are we talking about the same Photoshop?
> I counted 20 processes running the last time I had PS installed
I don't check how many background processes are running when I use Photoshop because I don't notice them at all. Almost every feature I use in it feels responsive, especially compared to how it used to be. If you're talking about telemetry, yeah, I hate that too, but I've more or less resigned to it as a necessary evil in all my professional tooling.
> The apps all take forever to load
Photoshop opens nearly instantly on my M1 Max Macbook Pro, as it did on my M1. It was slower on Intel, but what wasn't. I can open and close Photoshop three times before Discord even loads an empty window.
> drain battery if working remotely
I've never tried a remote workflow with Photoshop, so can't speak to that at all. Definitely does not seem like what the program is optimized for, and I would think battery drain would be the fault of whatever tool you're using to remote in, no? Or do you mean just working on an unplugged laptop? In which case, I find Electron apps that do one task poorly tend to be less efficient than even heavier desktop apps that 100 things well, Adobe or otherwise.
> and are far more unstable than in the past.
Sorry, what? I haven't had an Adobe app crash on me in probably eight years. I of course count that as good luck, but to say the current builds are less stable than older versions is just … insane to me. Thinking back to, say, the CS2/3 days, half my time in the program was spent Cmd+S-ing for fear of the inevitable hourly crash and loss of work. Photoshop crashes were a legitimate part of creative culture from like 1999 to 2012.
Sorry if I sound like an Adobe shill. We've just clearly had very different experiences with their products of late.
Where we are in agreement is that Blender is cool! I'm too much of a neophyte in 3D workflows to assess whether I think it's ultimately well designed (some bits seem to be … others not so much?), but it seems to run very well on the various machines I've tried it on and I have a great deal of respect for the nature of the program and the people behind it.
Given their position in the market, they could be cutting edge software performance wise and everything else. No one can say they don't have the resources.
Instead, they buy innovators (that solely exist in the first place because Adobe failed to keep up), do bare minimum to maintain, and charge rents.
This is a very old-man thing to say, but I think Photoshop peaked somewhere around version 6.0, which is what I’m still using. Amazing that it still runs, since it’s from the mid-90’s but it’s free of the cloud and really is very feature-dense. Thanks, windows appcompat team.
I discovered today that Adobe is introducing Project Shasta, a web-based AI-powered audio recording and editing tool. You can request access now [1].
It seems their intention is not only to provide AI-based audio editing and recording but also to cover the ground of what Riverside already offers.
Remote recording - Recording with others is as easy as sharing a link. Everyone’s audio is recorded in high quality locally, then Project Shasta syncs it back together in the cloud automatically.
"Soon to come features" list things we can already find in Descript, such as filler word removal or speech enhancement. And features already available in the beta include microphone checking for optimal quality and microphone distance, AI-powered audio, remote recording with guests, and project templates.
I was waiting to see what Adobe's take on AI-based audio editing and recording was, and it seems it's here. At the moment the project is referred to as Shasta; I imagine these capabilities either format a new product offering or are integrated with existing tools like Audition, Premiere, or After Effects.
As an old-school video editor who learned editing on analog VTRs (tape machines) and progressed to digital non-linear editing, I think the time saving potential of AI-assisted audio editing is substantial.
I still think it will be a while before AI is ready to create more than a first draft edit but if it handles 95% of the easy cases that's still a huge time-saving - especially on long-form projects. I spent so, so many hours of soul-sucking, rote drudgery doing things like manual audio ducking back in the day.
Hopefully something like this catches on w/ smaller podcasters. Listening to shit-quality compressed internet audio in a podcast interviewing someone really interesting is just such a shame!
I edit one and clean all that crap out; usually 2/3 of the material ends up being cut, and I've had to write up explainers for journalists on how giving an interview is a different kind of journalism from writing an article. But doing all those micro edits, volume balancing etc. etc. is draining.
A 60-90 minute episode can take 10 hours of intense editing by hand, longer if there are quality issues on material recorded in the field. My stuff sounds good but I've been making arrangements to hand off a lot of it to a junior editor and incorporate machine transcription/partial editing to take care of the 'first pass', and I can't tell you how relieved I am.
You have my sympathy. In doing my own interview recording I've found that starting with good environmental control and properly placed high-quality mics independently recorded at high bandwidth makes a profound difference and saves 70-80% of post labor. I think these AI editing assists could yield another 10% netting an order of magnitude cost reduction for high-quality interview production.
The denoising works very well. I found that mixing the enhanced audio with about -3 to -6 dB with the original voice audio works very well.
(short clip at a brewery)
https://youtu.be/M5pdHVoXQHE
I also tested with wind noise (outdoor speaker) and the audio "recovery" is amazing. It rescues bad field recordings that you normally can't use.
I'm impressed!
Hi! I’m Sam, lead designer of Shasta. You can check out the app at https://shasta.adobe.com (OP's post links to one of our launch announcement pages). Our enhance speech and mic check features are already available for everyone to try.
Have you seen Whisper by OpenAI that was discussed recently [0]? The quality is extremely good for transcription and even translation, wondering if your team could use it as it's also open source.
Is the plan for this to be only an editor for podcasts or is there a plan to also serve the podcast through this platform? (i for example almost never listen to podcasts but would sometimes just enjoy reading transcripts...)
We’ve been focusing on Shasta as a place to record and edit all kinds of spoken audio, including podcasts. As far as hosting and platform stuff, still figuring that out. But yeah, transcripts are great!
Sorry for the confusion! Applying for access is still required to access Shasta, our recording + editing app. We’ve been slowly ramping up in getting people access to it… working hard on making sure it’s a super smooth experience.
Buuuut in the meantime, we launched two of our AI features as standalone mini apps that anyone can use for free, and those are called Mic Check and Enhance Speech. They’re fun, try them out and let me know what you think.
This “Mic Check AI” - I actually just want to try this one feature.
I never know what gain I should set on my XLR mic + USB audio interface and I also don’t know how Teams/Webex will do to my signal. Is it compressing my signal? Noise gating it? No idea!
Or, if this is a solved problem with "AI" (a nonsense name for the most part, but if that's what they call it, that's what they call it) then don't and use the tools that get the job done. I have no reason to learn how a variable transmission engine works just to go shopping, and I have no reason to learn what to look for if tools do that for me. That's the whole point of good tooling: to turn conventional "you need to learn X before you can Y" into "this is archaic and no one needs to know this anymore". Or perhaps more in line with Adobe products: no one in their right mind is going to learn how to create uniform blurs with successive blends when they can just hit "filters -> blur -> gaussian blur". The tool made the traditional approach obsolete. Here's to many more things made obsolete.
As a Figma employee, there's obviously been a lot of shakeup recently for us. That said, this is one of the areas that actually makes me really excited to partner with Adobe. They've always been at the forefront of AI-esque assisted editing (content aware fill in photoshop was so far ahead of its time). Definitely excited to try this out and to see other AI projects by Adobe to help creatives.
Descript was the first thing I thought of. Since it does audio and video, I am not sure this can be called a competitor. Descript has such a head start with features I don't think Adobe will be able to catch up.
I wonder if they made Descript an offer before starting this project. Although, the base problem of editing audio or video with text isn't that difficult. They probably thought it could easily be cloned. The devil is in the details however, and the rabbit hole runs deep.
> Descript has such a head start with features I don't think Adobe will be able to catch up.
What specifically is Descript doing that Adobe couldn't do relatively easily, or isn't doing already in its other NLE products (Premiere, Audition, Rush, After Effects)?
I think everything associated with their lyrebird acquisition. I think it would probably not be as simple as hiring decent engineers to throw at the problem when it comes to Descripts machine learning offerings.
inb4 Adobe continues their streak of demonstrating they're incapable of building software and spends another couple of billion to buy out the competition.
it's not like it's a particularly out there idea, anything logical will have competition. I welcome that a large company with resources builds to market useful tools that I can expect to exist beyond the next round of funding.
Really excited to see the transcription based editing. There is a ton of work that this can simplify. I really hope some of this gets integrated into Audition or AE etc as well.
Signed up for early access. We currently use Zencastr for recording our podcast, which has been great, but curious how Shasta will stack up and it'd be nice to not have to pay for two subscriptions.
Given this, I am very concerned about Adobe's continued march into web apps. For most of my UI and web design work, I use Figma, and quite like its feature set, but that I cannot use it offline and that I cannot work in a file that requires over 2GB of RAM due to its browser RAM cap is infuriating to me when Photoshop (the supposedly worse program) enables me to manually allocate as much of my system's 64GB of RAM as I please. It's difficult to imagine any web app stably and efficiently growing to Swiss army knife-levels of capability. Not just in terms of performance and resource management, but also GUI, keyboard shortcuts, etc.
I've long assumed my CC subscription would die with me, unlike many (most?) of my peers, but if the web-based Photoshop somehow became the primary Photoshop, I may have to cancel my subscription, and then kill myself.